Deeplinks Blog posts about Content Blocking

UPDATE: National Assembly Member Bushra Gohar confirmed to the The Express Tribune that the Pakistani Ministry of Information Technology will withdraw its plans to subsidize a national blocking and filtering system. An official statement is due tomorrow.

For a majority of users, the Internet is a space that encourages free expression and the valuable exchange of ideas. Unfortunately, there are numerous cases around the world in which various forces act to silence people's voices online.

For years, Denmark has continued to block websites hosting sexually abusive images of children. In a recent attempt to do so, Danish police accidentally censored thousands of websites for several hours, including Google and Facebook. Visitors to the blocked sites were met with a page stating that the sites had been made inaccessible by the country's High Tech Crime Unit.

EFF is pleased to see that Websense, a company that produces Internet filtering technology, has issued a statement against Pakistan’s call for proposals [PDF] for companies to assist with their pervasive censorship plans. Websense’s statement, posted on their website also calls upon other producers of filtering technology to refuse complicity with Pakistan’s plans, which run counter to the right to free expression enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We recently reported on the Syrian government raid on the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, during which two bloggers and more than a dozen activists were arrested. The six women arrested have now been conditionally freed and are required to report to state security offices daily. However, nine men including blogger Hussein Ghrer and Mazen Darwish, the director of the Center, remain imprisoned.